The Experience of Christ

[Cal]

Originally Posted by aron

I've seen some take the logical conclusion that Mary is the Mother of God. Because Jesus is God incarnate and Mary is the mother of Jesus. Logical.

Don't trust your experiences.

Just to review. Here you are making a logical conclusion based on your experience with your experiences. You have determined from your experiences that they are not trustworthy. But you had to experience their untrustworthyness to come to this conclusion. So there is at least one experience you trust, that of experiences being untrustworthy. Therefore your statements are contradictory, because you have both trusted an experience and used logic to formulate a conclusion about it.

So please clarify your directive to not trust logic or experience. You might want to rephrase your statements to make them less black and white. Obviously we must trust logic and experience to some degree.

[aron]

Originally Posted by Igzy

You have determined from your experiences that [experiences] are not trustworthy. But you had to experience their untrustworthyness to come to this conclusion. So there is at least one experience you trust, that of experiences being untrustworthy. Therefore your statements are contradictory, because you have both trusted an experience and used logic to formulate a conclusion about it.

So please clarify your directive to not trust logic or experience. You might want to rephrase your statements to make them less black and white. Obviously we must trust logic and experience to some degree.

I do trust logic. But only to some degree. And I very much enjoy coming to the meetings and being disabused of my logical constructions. And also on this forum, as well.

Our senses are tricky: we shouldn't rely on them as purveyors of reality. Secondly, our interpretation of what our senses deliver us is also flawed. We are logical, yes, but only partly so. That is why the "flock" is such a safeguard. WL and WN both over-rode all safeguards and the result was ruinous.

So I saw OBW providing a "not so fast" safeguard to the all-encompassing notion of "experiencing Christ" and I simply wanted to say "amen". I don't think it's something that can be proven or disproven. It just doesn't appear to add value, and by the time you've hung all the cautionary flags on it, what is the point? It's just a distraction from the plain words that are in front of us.

Concepts are great. I love them, actually. I can churn them out daily. But at heart I'm still a sinner struggling home to the Father. My concepts won't deliver me. They have limited, temporary use.

Let me give an example. A few months back I got interested in the "grey area" between angels and the Holy Spirit. It became evident to me that there was possibly some overlap, that when John wrote of "spirit" in the apocalypse he may have meant the ministering spirit (angel) and not the Holy Spirit. So I put my verses out there, and my thinking, and was pretty soundly disabused of the notion. So I dropped it. I could either start my "church of Aron" where everybody agreed with me, or I could put my concepts on the shelf, possibly never to return, and simply go on. No big deal. I do it every day. I think, but try not to become captive to or emotionally invested in my thoughts. I don't trust them implicitly.

And I have a habit of phrasing my statements out in black-and-white simply to see if they can stand. I like the challenge. Many of them don't stand, very long. The objections to them arrive, and qualifiers to preserve them pile up hard and fast, and eventually I don't take them too seriously as representations of objective truth. The whole "experience of Christ" as a concept seems to fall in that category for me. Doesn't matter whose idea it was, initially. It really doesn't stand up well, on its own.

[Cal]

Originally Posted by aron

So I saw OBW providing a "not so fast" safeguard to the all-encompassing notion of "experiencing Christ" and I simply wanted to say "amen". I don't think it's something that can be proven or disproven. It just doesn't appear to add value, and by the time you've hung all the cautionary flags on it, what is the point? It's just a distraction from the plain words that are in front of us.

If he had just said that I would have said amen, too. But he went on talking about "stew" and that speaking generally about the experience of Christ wasn't supported in the Bible (a claim which some of the verses I shared contradicted). He just took it too far. It may not appear to add value to you, but it does to me. So why make a big deal about it? And it's not "just a distraction" and is the plain word. There are verses that clearly talk about a general experience of Christ. Read the list again. As I said, any verse that talks about "knowing God" is talking about experiencing God. It's talking about knowledge that comes from experience.

I don't think saying "experiencing Christ" carries any more risk than saying, for example, we should "cut off our hand" or "sacrifice our bodies" or "hate our own selves." Each of these carries risk of misinterpretation and with that possible serious consequences. I don't see how saying "experiencing Christ" is more risky, and there can be no argument that those other things are in the Bible.